While 2012 winner Sir Bradley Wiggins would have been an asset to Sky he had
no chance of victory this year

It did not take long for the fallout to turn nasty. Chris Froome had barely hobbled into a team car clutching his broken wrist before the tweeters and the bloggers were asking questions of Team Sky and Sir Dave Brailsford, in particular the decision to leave Sir Bradley Wiggins at home lapping Manchester’s velodrome while his comrades were out in France fighting in the trenches.

How stupid did Brailsford look now? Wiggins would surely have stepped into the Froome-shaped breach and taken the fight to Johnny Foreigner. He would have been able to roll back the years? Wouldn’t he?

Well, no. Probably not. Wiggins should certainly have been at this year’s Tour, in this correspondent’s opinion at least, but not because he would have won the race in Froome’s absence. Wiggins might have helped Froome to win it, had he been selected, and had Brailsford been able to manage the two men and create a decent team spirit. And his Rolls-Royce engine would undoubtedly be a help now to Richie Porte, the Tasmanian who has replaced Froome as Team Sky’s leader.

You could also have made a strong case for Wiggins’s inclusion on the grounds that his win in 2012 did so much to win Yorkshire the right to host the spectacular Grand Départ we witnessed last weekend, and for the fact that the British public desperately wanted to see him there. It would have been good PR all round, and good for the team to have had his experience and engine.

But to win the Tour stepping in as back-up? Extremely unlikely. Wiggins has not raced in a grand tour since his own slippery exit from last year’s Giro d’Italia, and has not really trained for one since.

When he won his Tour two years ago he had spent the preceding months schlepping up and down Mt Teide in Tenerife. This time around he had not gone to Team Sky’s altitude training camp.

His win at the Tour of California in May proved he was in good shape – certainly good enough to be part of Sky’s nine-man Tour team – but he was not racing the same calibre of rider out in the States as he would have been at the Tour; the Contadors and Nibalis of this world.

In the end, Brailsford gambled on creating the best team harmony possible, on giving Froome the team-mates he wanted, and the environment he wanted, in an effort to get the best out of his star man. He reasoned that it was Plan A that tends to win these big events and that this was his best Plan A. Brailsford has a CV to suggest he is good at getting these big decisions right.

He may have been right on this one, too. We will never know now.

What we do know is that Team Sky missed out on the goodwill that would have been generated by including Wiggins in their original line-up, and they also lost a strong rider who could have done a job, first for Froome and now for Porte.

To suggest that Brailsford should be castigated for the fact that Wiggins could have won the race is, however, going too far.